Video: A Charming Flip Book Directed by a Computer Program

Even the simplest flip book is a tedious thing to make, requiring the artist to draw and redraw on page after page. Faced with putting together a few dozen of them for friends, Matthias Dörfelt had a bright idea: He’d let a computer do the drawing. But Dörfelt’s flip books aren’t just rendered by computers. They’re authored by them, too.

All of the palm-sized volumes in Dörfelt’s I Follow series show the same simple story: A cute little anthropomorphized blob runs through a sparse black-and-white landscape, hurtling over shapes as it chases an elusive balloon. But each contains its own unique variation on the theme, dictated entirely by a computer.

Dörfelt, currently seeking a masters in Design Media Arts at UCLA, calls computational art his creative medium of choice. In the case of I Follow, that meant writing bits of javascript to dictate each visual element of the scene–from the shape of the blob’s body and the motion of its legs down to the landscape beneath it. A second program guides how those “procedural presets” are assembled, churning out perfectly idiosyncratic little tomes. All that’s left for Dörfelt to do is to put the pages once they’re printed. “The books are entirely generated from code,” he insists. “Nothing is actually drawn by hand.”

Dörfelt thought the flip books would be a nice thing to send to friends to stay in touch, and he felt the balloon pursuit was an appropriate story for the occasion. “The idea about generating a chase scene was something that I really liked, since I feel keeping in touch with people means effort, that at times can feel like a chase,” he explains.

But the project was also was a chance for Dörfelt to show how computer-generated work does not necessarily mean work devoid of humanity. “Weirdness and individual style is something that got lost or at least neglected in digital art and computational art especially,” he says. “I love programming as my medium and I am trying to prove with my recent experiments that there is room for weirdness, individuality and a recognizable artistic style in this field.”

Dörfelt picks a balloon color and a unique “call” based on the recipient. Photo: Matthias Dörfelt

“The computer doesn’t care about what you do with it,” he continues. “There is no such thing as ‘the digital aesthetic’ that is naturally dictated by the machine… The questions and tensions that arise about what we expect a computer to output and generate is something that I am interested in, and something I want to explore further in the future.”

The marriage of his own unique style and the computer’s unyielding work ethic proved to be a fruitful one. “Making the flip book procedural was the only way for me to realize the project with the idea I had in mind, to make a unique book for every person,” he explains. “Now that the software is finished, I can generate new books in a matter of minutes.” Just maybe don’t tell his friends that.